How To Flag And Fix Inappropriate Google Review

If you are receiving positive Online reviews from your customers, it shows that you are on the right track and ensuring your customer's satisfaction by taking their opinions seriously. But undoubtedly there may be times when your business receives negative reviews. In such a situation, you should know the strategy to manage the situation and reduce the risks associated.

Although negative reviews are the foundation of your brand's future, they can help you in innumerable ways to rectify the loopholes and sketch a better strategy towards your services. But sometimes you may get irrelevant and baseless negative reviews which can help you with nothing, but rather hamper your brand's reputation. Although you might know which reviews are credible or not, you can't go and explain it to every user who visits the review websites.

It's good to accept that positive and negative Google reviews are all parts of your business and it's proceedings but that doesn't mean that you should neglect and tolerate inappropriate and misleading reviews about your business. Rannkly believes that these specific steps must be taken care of,  to give a complete understanding of how to proceed with fixing baseless reviews.

Give a thorough reading about Google's review and image policies to understand what the company considers inappropriate. The examples of inappropriate reviews include-

• Reviews written by competitor websites to gain more traffic by defaming your company. If customers see such reviews,  it's quite obvious that they will avoid visiting your website and try your products.  In such a case, you are losing a great deal of your valuable traffic.
• Off topic reviews which are usually based on another customer's experience. A person should mention his personal experience with your company rather than giving a word of mouth review.
• Using inappropriate, offensive and foul words in reviews. One should maintain the basic decency while writing anything on a public forum.
• Personal attacks and threats to defame the company or any employee from your company.
• Reviews that try to create an unnecessary conflict

If you find any such review that goes against Google's review policies, don't stay quiet. Your brand's Online Reputation is everything, and you just can't neglect it.  Take action by applying the following steps-

1. Tap on "Flag as inappropriate" option using the Flag icon at the bottom right corner of the inappropriate review.

2. Google will have the final say on your request.

3. If it violates the policies, Google will remove it from your listing. If not, your request will be denied

4. Have patience and wait for a time duration of a week or so. Every day thousands of Reviews are posted. Google needs to access all of them, and it's quite impossible for Google to respond immediately.

Remember that the reviews that violate Google's policies should be flagged and not the ones which you dislike it disapprove of. There's no method for a search engine like Google to determine who is correct or who's wrong when there is a disagreement between a customer and a business owner. There might be cases when you do not like a particular review, but you cannot do anything about it if it's genuine and credible. All you need to do is accept it, respond back in an apologizing tone and convince them to try other better products of  your brand.

In case you are in an ambiguity, consider flagging the review so that Google can review it as per the policies. In case if the review isn't inappropriate, your request will be denied.